I went to South Carolina to watch my son play football. I came back with documented, century-old proof that the common good is not the enemy of profit — it is its best source. And with a conviction about what America should celebrate on its 250th anniversary.
Some journeys begin as a father and end as an economist. This was one of them — and it turned into one of the cleanest case studies of the purpose economy I have ever encountered.
I travelled to Hartsville, a town of barely 7,500 people in inland South Carolina, to visit my son Álvaro, who studies there on a football scholarship at Coker University. I arrived with the emotional agenda of any parent: watch him train, meet his teammates, understand the life he is building 6,000 kilometres from home. I was not expecting a strategic lesson. But Hartsville is, without knowing it, living proof of what I have spent years defending.
One Surname, One Company, One University
Let me give you the hard data before the emotion, because the data is what sustains the argument.
That tiny town is the headquarters of Sonoco, South Carolina’s largest corporation by revenue: close to $7.3 billion in sales, more than 23,000 employees and operations in over 30 countries. A global leader in packaging. A company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that was born right there, in 1899, when a man named Major James Lide Coker began turning Hartsville’s pines into paper cones inside a disused tobacco warehouse.
Nine years later, in 1908, that same family — the same surname, the same lineage — founded the university where my son studies today. It is not a coincidence of names. It is the same bloodline building, in parallel, the economic engine and the educational engine of its community. The wealth generated by the paper mill was reinvested in educating the very people of the territory that produced it.
Think about that for a moment. One hundred and twenty-six years ago, in a small town in the American South, a business family understood something that still eludes many boards of directors today: the lasting prosperity of a company depends on the prosperity of the place where it lives. Capital, if it wants to endure, has to grow roots.
Purpose Is Not an Ornament: It Is the Operating System
The easy route would be to stop at the founding anecdote. What is truly relevant is that this purpose remains, a century and a quarter later, the criterion by which Sonoco allocates its capital.
Its declared promise — Better Packaging. Better Life. — is not a marketing slogan bolted on after the fact. It works as an investment compass. Its major moves of recent years (the $3.9 billion acquisition of Eviosys to enter metal, the infinitely recyclable substrate) are explicitly justified by coherence with that purpose. When purpose decides where the money goes, it stops being storytelling and becomes strategy — the essence of a purpose-driven strategy.
And the numbers follow. Sonoco has science-validated emissions targets (Science Based Targets initiative): cutting its direct emissions by 25% by 2030 and its value-chain emissions by 13.5%. By the close of 2024 it was well ahead of its commitments, having exceeded its energy-reduction goal years before deadline. It financed much of that transition with $1.2 billion in green bonds, one of the largest sustainable issuances in the US packaging sector. This is not treasury greenwashing: it is dual capital, with real impact.
On the social side, the Coker DNA is institutionalised. In-house training through Sonoco University; pension plans funded at nearly one hundred per cent — a commitment to employees that almost nobody maintains any more; living, local community investment. For its centenary, the company installed a bronze sculpture at its headquarters titled “People Build Businesses.” An entire declaration of where they place their focus.
And the crowning fact: the President and CEO of Sonoco is called Howard Coker. We are not talking about descendants with a symbolic shareholding. The founding family is still running the company one hundred and twenty-six years later. That is what makes Sonoco an extraordinary case among purpose-driven companies — and not a nostalgic postcard.
Capital That Grows Roots vs. Capital That Extracts
The fascinating thing about Hartsville is that both ownership models defining the economic debate of our time coexist in that same town.
On one side, Sonoco: founding family at the helm, five generations of territorial roots, purpose sewn into the business. Capital that builds community. On the other, a few streets away, another multinational in the same sector owned by a private equity fund. Legitimate financial capital, but rootless by design: enter, optimise, rotate, exit. Same town, same business, two opposing philosophies of capital.
Purpose is not what a company does after making money. It is, when properly understood, the reason it keeps making money for one hundred and twenty-six years.
Let me be honest, because I owe my clients nuance and not hagiography: the model also carries tensions. Sustainability is shifting from voluntary commitment to regulatory obligation, which blurs the merit of those who practised it out of conviction. And there is an underlying ownership paradox: a family-souled management sustained on a majority institutional and indexed shareholder base which, by definition, rewards the index, not the purpose. Sonoco is today proof that this soul can survive public listing and global scale. But it is a real, unresolved tension. And it is exactly the terrain where a purpose methodology has something to say.
Reciprocity as a Business Model
And here is where the father and the economist meet again.
My son is at Coker thanks to a decision an entrepreneur made in 1908, when he resolved that the money from his factory should also serve to educate. Álvaro is, one hundred and sixteen years later, a direct beneficiary of that gesture. A Spanish boy plays football and studies because, more than a century ago, someone decided that business profit and the common good were not separate accounts.
That chain — from capital to knowledge, from knowledge to community, and back to the capital that made it possible — is the most honest definition I know of the economy of purpose. It is not philanthropy. It is not marketing. It is a value-creation model that reinvests in the conditions that make it possible — and that is precisely why it lasts.
Coda: July 4th, 250 Years, and the Lesson America Has in Front of It
I write this on my way back from the United States, where I travelled coinciding with July 4th, 2026: the 250th anniversary of its independence. A country celebrating two and a half centuries of an idea that changed the world.
America invented, and masters like no one else, the liberal economic model. And it built upon it its great moral answer: philanthropy. Since Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, the tacit pact of American capitalism has been clear — extract with all possible efficiency and give back generously afterwards. First you earn; then you donate. Two separate acts.
The purpose economy proposes something more ambitious and more difficult: not separating the two acts. Not extracting in order to compensate later, but building impact inside the very engine of value creation. The good not as the epilogue of the business, but as its architecture.
And the fascinating thing is that America does not need to import that idea from Europe. It has had it at home since before Carnegie finished writing his gospel. It has it in Hartsville. The Cokers did not wait to get rich before founding a university: they founded the company and the university almost simultaneously, because they understood they were the same work. That is the genuine American model worth celebrating on its 250th anniversary — not brilliant extraction followed by generous donation, but native purpose: capital that grows roots.
If the United States — the economy that best masters the liberal model — decides to take that leap, from giving to being, from philanthropy to purpose, and does so alongside a Europe that leads in framework and regulation, we will not be facing a cosmetic adjustment. We will be facing the transformation of the economic model of our century. And it will have, fittingly, 126-year-old American roots.
I came back from Hartsville with a suitcase full of a father’s pride and a reinforced economist’s certainty: the common good is not a concession to profit. It is its best long-term investment. The companies — and the nations — that understand this first will be the ones still leading a century from now. The rest will have extracted their value long before their territory stops recognising them.
Ángel Bonet is President and founder of ImpactCo, a global boutique consultancy specialised in the purpose economy and purpose-driven strategy, and author of “Companies that Grow With Soul.” If you lead a large family business, a corporation or a fund and want to build value that grows roots, let’s talk: tribu@impactco.es.